Ghost Watch Read online

  The hill we found ourselves on was reasonably steep, about a forty-degree incline. Here and there were outcrops of wet black volcanic rock. The ground was a tangle of tree roots, mud and fint.

  I heard a whistle and scoped around for its source. It was Ryder. He waved at us from thirty meters up the hill. I could just make him out through a tossed salad of palm fronds and snaking vines. I could also see Cassidy and West, but not Boink or Leila. Aside from the dense greenery, the fact it was dusk wasn’t helping with the visibility. I looked up and a burnished sky twinkled like pale blue stars through the holes in the tree canopy. Technically, at least, it was still daytime up there. We’d come down on the side of a heavily wooded valley, more rainforest than jungle. Wet black tree trunks patched with lime-green moss mingled with various species of palms, or shrubs with broad, fleshy, boat-shaped leaves. Liana vines, the type Tarzan swung on, hung down everywhere, some with no apparent anchor point overhead. I took another look at the canopy. It was mostly a solid roof, except where a fallen tree had left an opening and the plant life had burst forth on the forest floor below it as if with a steroidal fury, each bush and shrub competing in a life and death struggle with its neighbor to claim the precious extra sunlight.

  From the looks of all the broken tree limbs and shredded foliage lying around, the trees, many well over a hundred feet, had cushioned our fall and saved our lives, gloving the Puma like a big green catcher’s mitt.

  ‘French helicopters never go down, huh?’ I said to LeDuc as I hoisted Fournier to his feet. Both pilots’ faces were black with burned kerosene. Mine was probably the same.

  ‘I think perhaps we took on dirty fuel,’ he replied and then, with a shrug, added, ‘Nothing we could do.’

  ‘You could’ve checked it.’

  ‘We did, of course.’

  ‘Injured?’ I asked Fournier, who was wincing.

  ‘Mon épaule,’ said the co-pilot. ‘My shoulder. C’est disloquée.’

  ‘Dislocated?’

  ‘Oui,’ said Fournier.

  I checked the lieutenant’s arm. It wasn’t broken, but I could feel that the joint had sprung.

  ‘I can put it back in,’ I told him.

  ‘Do it,’ said Fournier with a nod, turning away.

  I took hold of the forearm and put my thumb on the joint so that I could feel what was happening under the skin. He let out an extended grunt as I rotated his arm back and forth slowly and popped it back in.

  ‘Rest it,’ I told him. ‘Nothing’s broken. You should be able to use it again in a day or so.’

  ‘Merci, monsieur,’ he said, forcing a smile.

  Picking our way up the hill, we came across the plastic medical case. The heat from the fire had distorted it on one side, but its contents were intact.

  Further up the hill, Rutherford, Cassidy, and Ryder had gathered our principals together behind an ancient fallen moss-and-fungi-covered tree.

  ‘How’re we doing?’ I called out as we approached.

  Ryder was about to provide an answer when I heard Leila scream, ‘I hate you!’ Then I saw her pummeling Twenny Fo in the chest with her fists. ‘This is your fault! Your fault! Shaquand would still be alive. I hate you!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ the rapper responded, ‘She was good. I loved her like family. I’m sorry, yo.’ He wrapped his former lover in his arms, and Leila stopped hitting him and merely sobbed, her shoulders heaving, but then she wrenched herself free and slapped him across the face as hard as she could.

  ‘Ouch,’ said Rutherford.

  ‘I hate you,’ she repeated in case he hadn’t caught it the first two times, and then burst into tears and allowed herself to be embraced by Ayesha.

  A little away from them, Peanut was standing and staring at the tree canopy. Beside him, Boink was rocking from side to side as if he’d lost his marbles. When I was a kid, I’d seen an elephant doing the same thing at the circus. The animal eventually broke its chain and sat on its handler, killing him. I hoped the big guy wasn’t planning on sitting on anyone.

  I could see that Ayesha had a cut on her forearm and that Peanut had a minor cut and Boink a more serious one. I handed the medical kit to Ryder and said, ‘See what you can do with this, Duke.’

  A couple of fat drops of rain landed on my face from above, the advance guard of a major assault from that quarter.

  Great.

  A peal of thunder rolled through the trees, and a downpour began to slant through the hole that our arrival had punched through the canopy. I heard a squeal from either Leila or Ayesha as they took cover in the lee of a tree trunk. This wasn’t rain. These were half cups of ice-cold water dropped from a thousand feet. It was an attack.

  Cassidy, down at the far end of the log, beckoned me with a signal.

  ‘Listen,’ he said.

  It took a few seconds for my hearing to adjust so that the familiar sound of small arms fire could be heard within the fusillade of rain. The gunfire was coming from somewhere in front of us, beyond the burning chopper, and it was coming closer. My gut felt like an eel had been released into it.

  A sudden flash of lightning lit up the trees and, a split second later, thunder burst over us with the boom of an artillery shell.

  ‘LeDuc,’ I called out, motioning for him to come down.

  The Frenchman trotted toward us with his co-pilot following, the man’s arm now in a sling.

  ‘Who the hell’s shooting at who?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, his voice full of concern. ‘There are at least six armies fighting each other in the DRC.’

  ‘How many of them are friendly toward the UN?’

  ‘Sometimes one, sometimes none.’

  ‘You got a map?’ I asked him. ‘I’d like to know where shit creek is relative to Cyangugu.

  ‘Oui,’ he said, opening his pack. He pulled out a tactical pilotage chart and rested it on the log. ‘We are here,’ he said, pointing to a spot on the chart along a line drawn with a grease pencil. Rainwater pooled in the map’s creases, and then ran off its plastic-coated surface.

  ‘You get a response from the Mayday call?’

  ‘Non,’ he said.

  Conventional wisdom said to stay with the downed aircraft, but it appeared that we’d had the extra bad luck of coming down in the middle of an argument that was being settled with cordite and lead. Conventional wisdom didn’t take that fairly major detail into account.

  LeDuc produced an emergency locator beacon, or ELB, from his pack.

  That was good news.

  Just then a sudden whoosh of a shell arced overhead, fired from somewhere behind us. Mortar fire. The round burst out of sight further down the hill.

  And just like that, the good news ended.

  ‘Jesus, where the hell have you put us down?’ Rutherford shouted at LeDuc over the thunder, just so the Frenchman knew who was to blame.

  Then a rocket-propelled grenade came out of nowhere, ripped through the air and exploded inside the Puma, sending a fireball into the treetops.

  ‘Shit,’ West exclaimed. ‘Where did that come from?’

  Behind us, Leila and Ayesha were shrieking, their hands over their ears.

  ‘Quiet!’ I shouted at them. They ignored me.

  I signaled Ryder and pulled my finger across my throat, telling him to silence them any way he had to. He pulled the women to the ground and put his arms around them. Twenny Fo, Boink, and Peanut dropped to their knees where they stood. Cassidy, Rutherford, and West had taken up firing positions, sighting their M4s on the forest downhill, covering any approach from that direction.

  Men’s voices were calling out from the forest below the burning Puma. They were whooping and hollering. I couldn’t understand the language, but it was full of bloodlust.

  ‘Ammunition?’ I asked Cassidy.

  ‘Standard loadout,’ he said. ‘Same as the others. I already checked.’

  That meant four magazines each for the M4s, two spares for the side-arms,
Sigs for Ryder and me, Berettas for the Army guys. No frag, no smoke. Shit.

  Our position was roughly forty feet up the hill from the blazing helicopter.

  ‘There’s a lot of lead being passed around. Could even be company strength down there – a hundred or so men,’ said Cassidy, assessing. ‘Assault rifles, light machine guns. RPGs we know about, grenades we don’t, but only because, so far, no one’s tossed one. At least, not at us.’

  Men surged through the trees, firing wildly into the aircraft wreckage.

  ‘Who else flies Pumas in this part of the world?’ I asked LeDuc.

  ‘Only MONUC – the UN force.’

  ‘Looks like you’ve really built some bridges in these parts,’ I said.

  More mortar rounds began dropping into the trees downrange, beyond the Puma’s remains.

  ‘And where’s that coming from?’ West wondered aloud.

  ‘The ridgeline, I ’d say,’ Cassidy reasoned. Several rounds hit the trees and airburst over their position. A whirling thrash of metal fragments stripped off the leaves and caused men to go down screaming.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  ‘Where to?’ Cassidy gave me a look that said he needed an answer before he’d do anything.

  ‘We can’t go down the hill and heading up’s probably not an option till we know who’s there. So do we slide left or right? We’ve got three right-handed shooters and one lefty – you. I say we head right so that the majority of us can shoot downhill across our bodies, if we have to, without having to turn before firing. We traverse till we make the ridge-line on our flank and rely on LeDuc’s ELB to get us a dust off.’

  ‘What if the threat comes from the high side?’ Cassidy said.

  ‘You’re the lefty,’ I said, keeping things light. ‘I’m counting on you.’ I nodded at his M4. ‘You can use that thing, right?’

  ‘Done much field work in your time, Major?’ he retaliated.

  ‘Some,’ I said.

  ‘The mission’s changed. No one’s gonna think any less of you if you hand off responsibility in this situation.’

  ‘You mean hand it off to you?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged.

  So here it comes, the macho SOCOM bullshit. And where was Ryder to keep him in line like Arlen had said he would?

  ‘We’ve got a couple of principals to deliver in one piece,’ I said. ‘I can’t see what’s changed.’

  He shrugged again. ‘Okay, sir, your way. Just trying to help out.’

  ‘You think there’s a problem with the plan?’

  ‘I got no mind to change it.’

  The small arms fire had tapered off somewhat, as had the mortar shelling. The thunderstorm, however, had only been warming up. There was lightning every second or less, and the rain had gone from heavy to blinding. I signaled Ryder to gather the principals and bring them down to us.

  Thirty seconds later, we were huddled in a circle behind the log, Rutherford and West keeping watch.

  ‘Anyone got a cell phone?’ I asked. Mine was now a liquid somewhere inside the Puma.

  Leila pulled out a personalized rose-gold iPhone from her jacket pocket. Ayesha, Boink, Ryder, Cassidy and Rutherford also produced cells.

  ‘Anyone raising a signal?’ I asked.

  Six heads shook.

  I moved on. ‘Who has serious injuries that need further attention?’

  No one piped up. I saw that the gash on Ayesha’s arm now wore a bandage, as did a cut on Boink’s hairline. Both cuts seeped blood.

  ‘Your arm. You doin’ okay?’ I asked Fournier.

  He nodded.

  Ayesha’s chin quivered and Leila’s makeup needed emergency treatment. Boink seemed a little more present than he had been, but Peanut was still off on some other planet beyond our solar system. I envied him.

  I came straight to the point. ‘We’re vacating this area immediately, walking in that direction,’ I said, indicating with a hand signal, ‘keeping the low side of the hill on our left. We appear to have landed in the middle of a disagreement. We have no intelligence on the forces below us or further up the hill. We have no radio either, so we can’t identify ourselves as friends or neutrals to the folks doing the shooting. But we have a map, and we know our position. Now all we have to do is get to a clearing where the electronic homing beacon can tell the MONUC rescue choppers where to find us. And I’m confident that by this time tomorrow we’ll be turning our noses up at snails in the French compound. Everyone clear?’

  Leila and Ayesha looked at me, their eyes wide with terror. Twenny Fo had his arm around Peanut. Boink stared at me, frowning. I noticed for the first time that he’d somehow managed to hang onto that bowler hat of his, pulling it down so that it covered his bandage. Barely perceptible nods from all but Peanut made me think that maybe the principals had actually taken in what I’d said. I demonstrated a few simple hand signals and got everyone up on their feet. And that’s when I froze. Nervous young soldiers with full automatic weapons had surrounded us. The raging storm and small arms fire had concealed the sound of their encirclement, and their line of approach had been outside Rutherford and West’s line of sight. Leila and Ayesha started screaming. The Africans closed in, yelling. One of them slapped Leila backhand across the face, which stopped her screaming and also silenced Ayesha. I counted ten men.

  LeDuc began plying them with French. I heard the word ‘MONUC’ mentioned several times, along with the word ‘allies’. He was telling them that we were supposed to be pals.

  One of the Africans responded by giving him a friendly jab in the ribs with the stock of his AK-47, which doubled the Frenchman over in pain. Fournier went to help his capitaine and took a rifle butt to the head, which put him on his knees.

  Cassidy took his hands off his M4 and raised them behind his head.

  It wasn’t one of the signals I’d demonstrated to our civilians, but they got the message anyway and followed suit.

  A soldier a little older in years than his comrades barked an order and our weapons were stripped from us. One of the others went around and checked that our fingers were interlocked behind our necks.

  The soldier giving orders walked over to Cassidy, flicked with a broken fingernail at the Stars and Stripes patch on his shoulder, and said, ‘American.’ He said it with interest, as if Cassidy was from an intriguing species that would look good stuffed and mounted over a fireplace.

  ‘You speak English?’ I asked him.

  ‘Tais-toi!’ the African shouted.

  ‘That’s a no then,’ I said.

  ‘He wants you to shut up,’ LeDuc whispered.

  The officer – at least, I assumed that’s what he was – hit LeDuc in the side of the head, knocking him down. The ELB fell out of his hand. The officer bent over and picked it up. He examined it, then threw it back on the ground and stomped on it a couple of times till the plastic casing disintegrated, revealing a smashed circuit board.

  One of the soldiers pushed me in the back to get my feet going, then shoved me a second time. They were marching us down the hill in a loose column. At the head of the column I saw West lower one of his hands, testing the rules. A soldier kicked him hard in the leg. The African then aimed his weapon at West’s head, which had the effect of making the sergeant duck into a half crouch as if he were expecting a bullet.

  The Africans laughed at him.

  Yeah, hilarious.

  A bolt of lightning lit up the area for the briefest instant, freezing the moment like a snapshot. Thunder rolled right on top of it, another bursting artillery round. The rain pelted the ground and broke into a mist that rose as if the earth itself were exhaling.

  Sporadic fire was still coming from the area below the wreckage. I doubted the ELB would have been able to get its signal through the electrical storm anyway, which meant the MONUC air traffic controllers at Goma International Airport only had an approximation of our last position, the one the pilots would have given in the Mayday call, assuming we were high enough for th
em to have had it received.

  I drank the kerosene-tasting water streaming down my face and wondered what would happen to us once this unit met up with the people who’d popped a rocket into the chopper. I was prepared to bet that at the bottom of the list would be a Napoleon brandy, a croissant and a ride back to Cyangugu. As I saw it, we didn’t have much of a window here. We had to act before too many more soldiers became involved, and the odds went from bad to zip-me-in. And, while I knew this with absolute certainty, I hesitated. The majority of organized attacks are successful; the bodyguards usually die; the bodyguards rarely fire their weapons effectively, if at all; the bodyguards almost never affect the outcome of the attack.

  As I was thinking this, I saw the briefest futter of something black flying through the air. It alighted on the back of the head of one of the Africans accompanying the column. Was it a bat? I peered at it hard. No, Jesus, it was a black throwing knife, barely visible against the victim’s black hair. The blade was embedded in the man’s skull just above the juncture of the spinal column and the base of his brain. There was nothing accidental about the target area. Whoever threw it knew exactly where to put it. The man began stumbling like he was drunk. Then he collapsed right in front of me, tripping me up so that I fell forward, out of control. As I went down, I grabbed the first thing I saw – the barrel of a rifle beside my face and pulled it down. The stock at the other end swung around and smacked into the mouth of the soldier holding it. His finger, caught inside the trigger guard, caused the weapon to fire off a three-round burst, which shot the kneecap clean off the soldier walking ahead of me, and he went down with a scream.

  The next four seconds were a blur.

  Cassidy swung his arm into the head of the distracted soldier closest to him, crashing the point of his elbow with ruinous force into the soft temple area. The man crumpled to the ground like an old suit slipped off its hanger. West turned to the guard beside him and buried his forehead in the guy’s face, smashing his cheekbone with a crack that reminded me of the sound the Puma made when it hit the tree. Then Rutherford took on his guard with a shoulder charge, propelling him into a tree trunk. And when he bounced off it, the SAS sergeant completed the move with a palm thrust to the throat that crushed the man’s windpipe.