Ghost Watch Read online

  I turned around in time to watch Leila using her fingernails to rake the face of the African struggling to hold her. The man howled and let go of her and covered his face with his hands as he ran – unfortunately for him, straight into Boink. The man mountain lifted him into the air, one hand on the African’s back and the other on his head. He then twisted his head, instantly breaking the man’s neck, and threw the body aside like a bag of trash. It landed beside LeDuc, who was face down in the mud – either dead or out for the count, I couldn’t tell which – but the soldier accompanying him was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Ayesha! No!’ Leila cried out and started running down the hill. A shadow picked itself up off the ground and tackled her before she’d taken more than half a dozen steps. It was Ryder. The two thrashed around, a tangle of arms and legs, Leila going for the agent’s eyes with those nails of hers until she understood who it was.

  Movement down the hill caught my attention. I realized that the gun I’d grabbed was in my hands, and the Africans were running away. We couldn’t allow them to regroup, inform on us and bring reinforcements. So I found targets, fired once, twice, and two men dropped to the ground as if their shoelaces were suddenly tied together. Sighting the rifle left and right, I counted four more soldiers, including the officer – all of them backing away toward the exploded Puma. But these guys weren’t running, they were taking it slow. And I couldn’t shoot them, on account of they were holding Twenny Fo, Peanut, Fournier, and Ayesha in front of them, using them as human shields.

  Hostage

  ‘We have to get them back!’ Leila demanded. ‘Twenny Fo, Ayesha, Peanut, the other pilot . . . You can’t leave them!’ ‘We have to get out of here now is what we have to do,’ I told her.

  ‘That’s bullshit, man,’ said Boink, his fat forefinger stabbing the front of my body armor. ‘Give me a gun and I’ll go down there and fuck their shit up.’

  ‘Ryder!’ I called over my shoulder.

  ‘Here,’ he said, right behind me.

  I turned three-quarters and saw him rubbing a bloody wound on his head.

  ‘You okay?’ He’d received a rifle butt from the departing Africans that had knocked him out cold.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Get the principals secured further up the hill, then sit down for a while,’ I told him.

  ‘What about Ayesha?’ Ryder asked, his voice cracking.

  I faced him and said quietly, an inch from his face, ‘Duke, head ’em up the hill to that tree.’ I indicated the one I meant, a tree with a vast splay of roots, like a cage that seemed to drop from branches high above the forest floor.

  ‘People everywhere are gonna know what kind of man you are, Cooper,’ Leila hissed, her face disintegrating as she began to cry, the hopelessness of the situation getting its hooks into her. ‘Coward,’ she spat, and it was like the word itself landed in the mud at my feet.

  Ryder hesitated and looked into my face before deciding further conversation probably wasn’t a good idea, and then herded Leila and Boink up the hill. Coward. I wasn’t going to let it get under my skin. Our survival chances were diminishing moment by moment. There was only unavoidable unpleasantness ahead.

  ‘LeDuc!’ The Frenchman materialized at my shoulder as I walked to the African whose kneecap had been shot off. ‘They speak French here, right?’

  ‘Oui,’ he said.

  We walked several paces and I waited for the plea to rescue his co-pilot.

  ‘Do not worry about Fournier, he is a survivor,’ LeDuc said, surprising me.

  ‘I need you to translate,’ I told him.

  Sergeant Cassidy was patting down one of the dead Africans. He was wearing the man’s green beret and held up my Ka-bar as we walked by.

  ‘Yours, I think,’ he said.

  I took it and sheathed it.

  ‘And we’ve got our M4s back,’ he said as he turned the man’s head to one side. The metal haft of the anodized black throwing knife was sticking out of the corpse’s skull, covered in mud and streaked with blood and brains. Cassidy pulled his Ka-bar and gave the embedded blade a few taps left and right to loosen it before attempting to pull it out. He’d done this before, obviously. Jerking the blade free, he wiped it clean on his leg and then scraped the goop off his pants and flicked it onto the ground. He replaced the knife in a scabbard hidden in the top of his body armor, right where he’d submissively clasped his fingers before being asked to do so by our captors.

  ‘Insurance policy,’ he said, adjusting its position.

  ‘We move out in three minutes,’ I told him. ‘Pass it on.’

  Rutherford and West were also checking the dead and wounded and stripping the corpses of anything useful.

  LeDuc and I approached the African writhing slowly in the mud, making noises like a wounded animal, his bloody, mangled leg cramped rigid in front of him. The guy was small, in his late teens with a youthful beard, a front tooth missing and its partner brown with rot.

  ‘You told me there were six armies fighting in the Congo,’ I said to LeDuc. ‘Ask him which one’s his.’

  ‘I don’t need to ask him this. The blue patch on the shoulder of his uniform tells me that he is FARDC – Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo. These are DRC government troops.’

  ‘I thought you said the DRC army was on your side?’ I asked him.

  ‘Generally speaking, yes.’

  ‘When you told them that you were MONUC, what was their reaction, apart from encouraging you with a rifle butt to shut your mouth?’

  ‘They said they knew this.’

  ‘That you were allies?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘Funny way to treat a friend.’

  ‘The FARDC is not an army like we have in France. It is corrupt. There are many factions and agendas. You want me to ask him why they are not friendly toward us?’

  ‘First ask him what his unit strength is.’

  LeDuc kneeled and spoke to the man in French. The soldier ignored the question. LeDuc persisted and still got no response. The man was either so deeply in pain that he’d lost touch with the real world, or he was using it as an excuse to play dumb. There was no time for games.

  ‘Sir, I think this is yours,’ said West behind me. He handed me my Sig. ‘A full mag, nothing up the spout,’ he informed me before walking back to see to the dead.

  I dropped out the magazine and then pulled back the slide. As he said, the chamber was empty, the mag full. I reinserted the mag, racked a round into the spout and put the safety on.

  The man on the ground cried out. He was shaking, his eyes locked on the Sig. And then he started talking like his life depended on it. Maybe that’s exactly what he thought, that I was going to bust a cap in his ass. I holstered the weapon.

  LeDuc repeated the question. Now the guy wouldn’t shut up. He shouted, his voice competing with the noise of the thunder and torrential rain.

  ‘They are company strength,’ LeDuc said. ‘He is not exactly sure how many, but more than one hundred and twenty men.’

  ‘Ask him who occupies the ridgeline. Who are they fighting up there and why?’

  A handful of seconds later, LeDuc had the answers.

  ‘It is the CNDP. The numbers are similar, though the rebels have mortars, causing his unit much harm. He says they chased the CNDP out of a village a day’s march away. They were killing civilians. He says they are bad men.’

  ‘Do you believe him?’ I asked.

  LeDuc gave me the Gallic shrug. ‘This man is a private soldier. What would he know?’

  ‘Ask him why they blew up your chopper.’

  The Frenchman asked the question, and the African pleaded with LeDuc in a way that I knew meant he didn’t have an answer, despite his private fear that I was going to whack him if he didn’t.

  ‘He says he doesn’t know,’ LeDuc confirmed. ‘He thinks it was fred on for target practice.’

  ‘There’s lot of rainforest out there, but his patrol found us quickly. Ask
him if they were looking for us.’

  ‘Oui, oui,’ the man said immediately, adding a barrage of French to go with it.

  ‘He says their orders were to find us and take us prisoner.’

  ‘How did they know there was anyone on board to take prisoner in the first place?’

  LeDuc asked the question and the man on the ground shook his head and mumbled a reply.

  ‘He does not know,’ said the Frenchman. ‘They were just doing what they were ordered to do.’

  Hmm . . . maybe it was just expected that an aircraft the size of the Puma would be carrying passengers, more than they found dead in the wreckage. I had one more question. ‘How long is FARDC going to occupy the valley?’

  After a brief discussion the Frenchman said, ‘Once they have chased the enemy from the heights.’

  I didn’t like their chances of that. Armed as they were with mortars, the folks occupying the high ground would take some dislodging.

  I stood and LeDuc stood.

  Two shots blasted away behind me, making me jump back and twist around and reach for my own pistol.

  Boink lowered a Beretta.

  ‘Merde!’ LeDuc exclaimed.

  ‘You’re finished with him, yo?’ my principal said.

  I looked back at the captured FARDC soldier. Smoke curled from two black entry holes in the man’s forehead, blood starting to well from both; one eye was open and sightless, the other half hidden by a heavy lid. I tried not to think that the kid had a mother – we’d gone way past that now.

  Further up the hill, I saw Leila lower her iPhone from her face. Her other hand covered her mouth, horrified by what she’d just witnessed, her eyes locked on me like somehow it was my doing.

  ‘What the fuck?’ I shouted at Boink. ‘Give me the gun!’

  He stood there, unmoving, the pistol pointed at the ground. He was considering holding onto it, or maybe even using it again . . .

  ‘We killed their people already,’ he said. ‘There won’t be no peace accord, yo.’

  ‘Give me the damn gun!’ I repeated, taking a step toward him, hand out.

  He brought the pistol up. I didn’t know this guy, but I’d seen what he was capable of doing. Was it my turn next?

  ‘Careful,’ I told him.

  ‘Easy, soldier man,’ he said, reading the danger.

  He flicked his hand and the weapon spun in midair and landed in his palm, handle out toward me. I snatched it away from him.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I asked him, pointing at the dead man with the pistol.

  ‘Doin’ my job.’

  ‘Your job?’

  ‘His people took Twenny. I took him.’

  ‘Do that again and there’ll be consequences.’

  He shrugged and turned away.

  When their people came back and saw the man’s head resting on a pillow of his own gray matter, they’d know he’d been killed in cold blood. This would come back on us. I leant over the body, patted him down. Two magazines were stuffed into the webbing on his chest. I took them and checked his pockets. Empty. His green battle uniform was baggy, from the Vietnam War era and several sizes too big for him. And there was the unusual blue patch on his left shoulder that LeDuc said marked him as FARDC. I stood up.

  Rutherford and Cassidy were checking the other downed Africans.

  ‘Any wounded?’ I called out.

  Cassidy shook his head.

  ‘We’re gonna have to watch him,’ said West motioning at Boink’s back.

  ‘Yeah,’ said West. He stood and nodded at the rifle slung over my shoulder.

  I looked at it properly for the first time, wiped the blood and saliva off the stock with my sleeve. The weapon was a Nazarian Type 97, the export version of the standard assault weapon issued to infantry units of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army: 5.56mm NATO rounds, M16 mag, single shot, three-shot burst, and full auto options at the flick of a lever on the receiver. A good and capable rifle. It might have been the export version, but I still wondered where someone would come across a weapon of this sort in the Congo.

  ‘Found this on the ground,’ said Cassidy, interrupting my thoughts.

  Twenny Fo’s diamond ring was between his thumb and forefinger. ‘What you want to do with it?’

  ‘Hold onto it for the moment.’ I turned to Rutherford. ‘Souvenir a few of those uniforms with the blue shoulder patches. The berets too. They might come in handy.’

  ‘Got it, skipper,’ said Rutherford.

  Although barely ten minutes had passed since Twenny Fo, Ayesha, Peanut and Fournier had been taken prisoner, I expected another, larger patrol would be along soon to finish the job, assuming the FARDC was organized.

  West, Cassidy and I trotted up the hill toward Ryder, Leila and Boink.

  ‘I’m going to make sure you’re all kicked out of the Army,’ said Leila when we were close enough. ‘Your job was to protect us and you failed.’

  I wasn’t in the Army but maybe now wasn’t the time to tell her.

  ‘You still alive, ain’t you?’ said Cassidy.

  ‘I’m going to sue you to the poor house,’ Leila said, her eyes boring into Cassidy and then me.

  It wasn’t the right time to tell her I was already in it. ‘We didn’t cause that to happen,’ I told her, slipping into debrief mode. ‘The soldiers that took our people are government troops of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, supposedly friendly to MONUC. But for some reason they’ve decided to be unfriendly. What we do know is that we’ve come down in a war zone where there doesn’t seem to be a lot of rules. Bottom line, we’re no longer protecting you against possible attack. There’s nothing possible about it. So you can stop behaving like a child who isn’t getting her way and do what we tell you to do, when we tell you to do it. Because, otherwise, you’re not getting out of here alive.’

  ‘I ain’t listenin’ to this bullshit,’ said Leila, turning away and holding her hand palm out at me as if to defect my words.

  I wondered what to do next – our options were limited and diplomacy wasn’t my strong suit. We needed our principals’ cooperation to have a chance of bringing them out in anything other than body bags.

  I glanced at Cassidy. ‘You got that ring?’

  He fished around in his webbing and put it in my hand.

  ‘Recognize this?’ I asked the diva. ‘We found it on the ground.’

  ‘It’s Deryck’s.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘That’s Twenny Fo’s name. I gave it him when we were . . .’ Her chin dented, and she looked skywards briefly in an effort to get control of herself.

  I put the ring in the side pocket of her Army jacket. ‘You hold onto this for . . . Deryck. Give it back to him when you see him next. Now, let’s go.’

  ‘If we leave now, I’ll never see him, or Ayesha, or Peanut, ever again.’ Leila’s emerald eyes were glossy with tears. She sat down on the wet earth and wrapped her arms around her legs. ‘Say what you like, but I ain’t leavin’ here without them.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I muttered, scraping the bottom of the options barrel. ‘LeDuc. Do we have sedatives in that medical kit that we can administer with a hypodermic?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘Then rack it up.’ I looked down at the woman. ‘Ma’am, we’re gonna have to carry you out.’

  ‘Not unless you gonna carry my ass too, yo,’ said Boink. He moved to stand beside the singer and crossed his massive arms in a further symbol of defance.

  That was it. I had no more cards to play. The rulebook had nothing on this. I took a deep breath and let it out. ‘Okay, you win. We stay. But, just so you have all the facts, there are about a hundred and twenty soldiers down there, who seem intent on taking us captive for purposes unknown. Their people were killed on their first attempt at this, and you can be sure we won’t get a pat on the back for that. So, fortunately, with the additional weapons we’ve secured, we have enough guns to arm everyone. But our ammunition is limited. If
the bad guys attack in strength we can probably hold out for ten minutes, maybe less, depending on how many of us get killed or wounded in the initial exchange, and how bad the wounds are. There’s going to be a lot of lead flying around, so perhaps ten minutes is optimistic. The electronic beacon we had is smashed, so our people in Cyangugu and LeDuc’s in Goma don’t know for sure where we’ve come down. What I’m saying is, there’ll be no last-minute rescue. Our bodies may never be found. Leila, if you happen to survive and they capture you, my suggestion is that you tell them you’re a rich and famous star who’ll pay millions for your release. Assuming they go for that, rather than using you for some other purpose – and I think you know which one I mean, which they may do anyway – when you finally get in front of those TV cameras, you can tell the world that your security team fought bravely and died so that you could keep making music videos.’

  I was rambling because I was angry. In truth, I was on the verge of defaulting to my duty as the officer in charge and doing what was best for the men I was commanding, which, at the very least, was to vacate the area as soon as possible. If it meant leaving the civilians behind to accept whatever fate they were determined to meet, I didn’t see that I had much choice but to let them do exactly that.

  Leila stood up. ‘I want you to know that this is not about making music, this is about not giving up on the people you love.’ She brushed the wet leaves off her butt and pulled the Army ball cap down low over her face. ‘Now, which way are we going?’

  ‘That way,’ I said, stunned by the sudden change of heart. Maybe my little speech had gotten through to her. I pointed in the opposite direction to the one we’d initially decided to take before we were surrounded. ‘Any movement?’ I asked West.

  ‘Nada,’ he replied.

  ‘Rutherford?’

  ‘Clear.’

  ‘Let’s do it,’ I said.

  There was very little light left. Walking in this terrain in the pitch dark was also a big risk. We could stumble into an ambush or walk off a cliff. Lex Rutherford took point, with Cassidy behind him and the rest of us lined up behind them. I brought up the rear. We learned that the hill the Puma came down on was actually part of a valley that curved horseshoe-like around to the northwest on one side and southwest on the other. The walk was taking us away from Lake Kivu and Cyangugu. We picked our way through the rainforest for half an hour, by which time the thunder and lightning were only sporadic, and the small arms fire was far enough away that it sounded like corn popping in a pot with the lid on. I called a halt between a couple of vast trees that gave us cover on two sides, then kicked off the discussion we had to have. Cassidy and Ryder took the watch this time, but the space between the trees was tight, so they weren’t left out of the conversation.