The Jeep might have some answers.
The Jeep is parked on the central road in the village, with four huts on either side of the road in front of it. All those huts are lit from within, throwing the vehicle into sharp focus. He moves along the far row of huts, towards the driver’s side, keeping an eye on the Jeep and at the same time checking out the huts. In some of these huts he sees some men shot and dead. They account for the shots he has heard. Still, for a village of this size there should be more men about, and their absence bothers him. Maybe they weren’t in the village when the trucks arrived, or they were carted off in the trucks by the soldiers.
He tucks this mystery at the back of his mind and concentrates on the Jeep and the huts in its immediate vicinity. After clearing the huts in his row, he lies prone in the deepest shadow and looks at the Jeep from the corners of his eyes to see if he can detect any movement. He takes a risk and runs at a half crouch toward the Jeep, keeping out of its windshield’s sight line. The Jeep is a standard FDLR vehicle, battered but serviceable, with its keys still in it. He is tempted to pocket the keys but squelches the thought. Not knowing the strength of the soldiers left in the village, he doesn’t want to give his presence away.
He looks across the driver’s seat towards the other row. He thinks he hears some murmuring above the women’s anguish, but he isn’t sure.
He crouches and runs towards the row of huts. The first of the four is empty. The next one has a woman facing the door, and when he peeks around the opening, her eyes widen and her mouth opens. All she can feel is a rush of air as he flows across the hut, clamps his hand over her mouth, squeezes a pressure point on her carotid, and renders her unconscious. He gently lowers her into a shadowed corner and moves on to the next hut.
This is where he can hear the murmuring louder. He goes around the rectangular hut to see if he can peer through a crack in the wall, but there is none. The hut has two windows on the two opposite walls, and peering through them would illuminate his face.
Over the years of working as a PMC with the agency, he has amassed exotic gadgets, from shoe-heel cameras to bug-sized remote-controlled robots. He unsheathes a meter-long slender cable from the leg of his fatigues. One end of the cable has a USB plug and the other end a self-focusing twenty-megapixel camera. The iPhone is its power source. He plugs the cable into his iPhone, loops the camera through a corner of the window, and watches its feed on his phone.
Two white males, one with his back to the door, the other sideways, are squatting beside an almost naked woman. She is still, and he can’t tell if she is unconscious, dead, or too frightened to move. The men are counting something. One of them is stuffing what looks to be gravel and large pebbles into pouches, and then packing those away into a duffel bag. The other is making notes in a dirty folder.
He turns the camera 360 degrees to get a full view of the hut.
No one else. Good.
He slips the camera out, disconnects it, and puts it away. He makes tracks to the back of the hut and slips across to check the last one. It’s empty, though shows signs of having been ransacked, with clothing and utensils strewn across the floor.
He goes back to the hut with the men. No camouflage, no way to get in stealthily, so he just slips inside the door, moves to its side, and stands with his back to the wall.
Sideways is still counting when he feels the weight of Zeb’s stare and looks up. His face goes slack with astonishment, and then he blurts out, ‘Who the fuck are you, dude?’
Zeb is impassive. He recognizes Sideways. Conley Stark, thirty-five, ex-Rangers, served twice in Iraq, likes knives, dishonorable discharge for raping a woman.
Stark makes another attempt. ‘Qui vous est?’
Zeb has never believed in pleasantries.
Backside turns around to see what the fuss is about. Brink Schulte, ex-Rangers, served with Conley in Iraq.
‘Who the hell is this dumb fuck, Con?’
‘Whoever he is, and he’s certainly dumb, he’ll be dead in a second.’
Zeb remains calm, allowing his presence to fill the room. This will end in only one way.
Stark rises smoothly, and a Gerber Mark II knife appears in his right hand.
Brink pauses from his bookkeeping to watch Con take out the intruder. He loves a good fight, and Con is the best he has seen with a knife. The bookkeeping can wait for a few minutes.
Or maybe not…
The intruder moves from still to attack in a nanosecond, a silent high leap from a standing position. His left leg takes out Con’s knife arm. Brink can hear the bone snap, even as Zeb’s right leg collapses Con’s throat. Zero to dead in less than a second, Brink thinks dimly as the intruder lands smoothly and faces him.
Not even a glance to Con, who is in his death throes.
Even as Zeb launched his Kalaripayattu strike on Con, he was aware that a third person entered the room, uttered something, grabbed the duffel bag lying near Brink, and made good his escape.
Zeb gazes impassively at Schulte. Answers. Schulte will give them. He has no choice.
An hour later Zeb comes out of the hut.
The Jeep is gone, presumably taken by Holt. It was he who had come into the room during the fight.
Carsten Holt. Unofficial leader of the Rogue Six. Now Rogue Three, he corrects himself. Ex-Seal, used by the agency for wet work, expert in close protection work and explosives. Quit the army to go freelance and isn’t particular how he earns his money. Now running a mine-hijacking and mineral-trading racket in the Congo. The agency had him on a watch list for some time and had blacklisted him and his closest associates when the Congo happened. The surviving two with Holt are Quink Jones and Pieter Mendes. Both of them ex-Rangers.
He powers up his satellite phone and wakes up Andrews.
Over two hundred women raped — some of them young girls — some children and infants killed. The perpetrators — about forty FDLR soldiers and six ex-agency mercenaries. Many of the villagers in the DRC who worked in the mines had a private stash of ore, which they used to trade, and it was such homes that brought Holt and his band to Luvungi.
The men in the village had been out working in the mines when Holt and the soldiers arrived. Cobalt ore and pebbles were what Stark and Schulte were weighing and recording when Zeb sent them to their Maker. Rape and killing was part of instilling fear and cooperation. Schulte knew that Holt was working with someone in the States for capturing mines and selling the minerals but didn’t know who that was.
Andrews goes Chernobyl, his tirade lasting a good few minutes, burning the air. Andrews calms down a long while later.
‘You have to come back immediately. We need you to meet the UN and depose. You’re the first eyewitness account to this horrific…this atrocious…this sickening…whatever one calls it.’
Zeb is silent.
‘I guess Schulte, Stark, and Boulder are in no position to embarrass the agency?’ Andrews asks, knowing full well what the answer is.
Zeb keeps his counsel.
‘I want you back here immediately. Once the news breaks that FDLR soldiers and some mercenaries who seem to be American were involved in mass murders and multiple rapes in the Congo, the shit will not just hit the fan, it will create a mushroom cloud over Washington. The White House will be brown. I need you back with your photographs and your record of the events to prevent collateral damage here. Your being there, we could spin it that you helped stopped the most horrific abuse in Africa in history. I can see the headlines now.’